Zodiac Station Read online

  Table of Contents

  Also by Tom Harper

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Tom Harper

  Lost Temple

  The Book of Secrets

  The Lazarus Vault

  Secrets of the Dead

  The Orpheus Descent

  The Crusade Series

  The Mosaic of Shadows

  Knights of the Cross

  Siege of Heaven

  About the Author

  Tom Harper was born in West Germany in 1977 and grew up in Germany, Belgium and America. He studied history at Lincoln College, Oxford, worked for a while in the glamorous world of pensions services, and now writes full time. He lives in York with his wife and two sons. His novels have been sold into twenty languages, from Brazil to China. In 2001 Tom Harper’s debut, The Blighted Cliffs, was the runner up for the CWA Debut Dagger Award. He can be found online at www.tom-harper.co.uk.

  ‘Polar Vortex’ is an ebook-only short story that ties into the events in Zodiac Station and can be found online.

  ZODIAC STATION

  Tom Harper

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

  Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Tom Harper 2014

  The right of Tom Harper to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 444 73143 9

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Owen and Matthew

  North Pole Adventure 388

  One

  USCGC Terra Nova

  Crew: 81 Coast Guard, 33 civilians

  Mission: Scientific Support

  Position: Nansen Basin, Arctic Ocean

  What the hell is out there?

  Carl Franklin, Captain of the US Coast Guard ice-breaking cutter Terra Nova, stared out the wheelhouse windows. A 360˚ field of view – but he might as well have his nose pressed against a painted wall. The clouds had settled after the storm, fusing the sky with the air and the air with the ice to make a perfect blank. Growing up in Maine, he thought he’d seen fog, but this was like nothing else. Even the bow light wasn’t much more than a rumour.

  He put his hand against the cold glass, just to touch something solid. Hopefully the crew didn’t notice. In the middle of the Arctic Ocean, a thousand miles of ice around them and four thousand metres of near-freezing water below the keel, he didn’t want them thinking their captain was losing his grip on reality.

  He rocked back on his heels, reassured by the mass of sixteen thousand tons of steel under his feet. The Terra Nova was state of the art, the pride of the Coast Guard: an ice-reinforced vessel capable of making a steady three knots through four-foot ice, of smashing her way to the North Pole if need be. She’d already been there twice in her short working life.

  A wobbling reflection ghosted up out of the fog. Santiago, the operations officer, an Arizona Latino who’d traded his hot, landlocked state for a frozen ocean. A thing for deserts was how he explained it; a thing for desserts, they teased him back.

  Franklin turned. The spooky Santiago in the window became the real deal, six foot two of seafaring muscle, slowly being promoted to fat. By the time he made admiral, Franklin thought, the doctors would be giving him a hard time on his health assessment.

  ‘The geeks want to go play,’ Santiago announced.

  The geeks were the scientists, the Terra Nova’s cargo, and her mission. Thirty-three scientists from all over the world, measuring the water, measuring the ice, measuring the snow, measuring the air. Fifty kinds of cold, Santiago called it. It kept them happy.

  ‘What’s the ice like?’ he called to the crewman hunched over the satellite chart. A tie-dye swirl of greens, oranges and reds, constantly mutating as the ice shifted.

  ‘Shitty for fishing, sir.’

  Franklin checked his watch. Ten thirty at night, but that didn’t mean anything here. The sun had come up four days ago and wasn’t going to set for five months. Not that you’d know, with that damned fog.

  ‘They can have three hours.’ He looked out the window again, at the blank grey void that held the ship fast. They’d be lucky to measure their own feet in that.

  ‘Put an extra man down there on bear guard.’

  What the hell is out there?

  Boatswain’s Mate (second class) Kyle Aaron hugged the Remington 870 to his chest and hoped he wouldn’t have to use it in a hurry. The gloves made his fingers so fat he could hardly get them round the stock, never mind pull the trigger. Not that the gloves kept him warm, either: the only thing he could feel in his hands was prickling cold.

  He shouldered the shotgun and swung his arms to get some blood flowing. Behind him, the geeks did their thing on the ice. Some of them had put up a tripod and were using it to winch a yellow buoy down through a hole they’d bored. Others paced out survey lines, walking backwards and forwards over the snow like they were checking for litter. Aaron, who’d scraped a D in ninth-grade bio, and spent four years of high school avoiding chemistry, wondered why they did it. He stamped his feet and wished they’d hurry the fuck up.

  The fog had thinned a little. A ways back, t
he Terra Nova’s red hull loomed over the ice, her white superstructure dissolving into the cloud. He could hear the rasp of the deck crew scraping off the ice, and the low throb of her engine as the propellers turned slowly to maintain position. The yellow crane arm on her foredeck dangled the gangway on to the ice. He wondered how fast the scientists could run up it if a bear came.

  The ground trembled; the ice cracked and growled. The shotgun wobbled in his hands. Growing up in Florida, cold was something you only saw at the movies. If he’d ever thought about the Arctic, the sea ice, he’d imagined it would be like the local skating rink. His first transit with the Terra Nova had set him right. However smooth the ice wanted to be, it sat on top of an angry, heaving ocean. Signs of violence were everywhere: high ice sails, pushed up by the pressure of two plates crashing together; sudden cracks of open water, even at minus twenty, where the ice sheet had suddenly cut apart. Broken chunks of rubble, like the wreckage of a frozen civilisation; and a crust of snow that sometimes froze hard enough to walk on, and sometimes dropped you through up to your knees.

  He’d joined the Coast Guard to bust drug smugglers, and rescue beautiful rich women from drowning in the Gulf of Mexico. Not to freeze his ass off guarding geeks who wanted to count polar-bear shit.

  The ice trembled again. He heard a howling sound, not the wind – there was none – but the agony of the ice being torn apart by the sea below. Unless it was a bear. He peered into the fog. Shadows spun inside the cloud: changing light, changing ice. Was there something else? Something moving?

  If you think it’s a bear, it’s a bear. That’s what they taught you. He lifted the gun and thought about firing a warning shot. If he was wrong, he’d have some pissed-off scientists. But let it get too close and he’d have to kill it – and you didn’t make rank in the Coast Guard by shooting endangered species.

  You didn’t make rank by letting geeks get eaten, either. He chambered a slug. The shadows swirled like stirred paint, spots in front of his eyes. He couldn’t see a fucking thing. No distance, no definition.

  But one of the shadows wasn’t moving like the rest. It stayed in its place, slowly swelling out of the fog. Coming towards him.

  He tugged off his Gore-Tex glove. If he hadn’t been wearing liners, the metal trigger would have stuck to his skin. He aimed the gun up.

  If you think it’s a bear, it’s a bear.

  The shot echoed across the open ice – maybe all the way to the North Pole. It certainly got the scientists’ attention. The ones who remembered the drill ran back to the gangway, dragging equipment; others, reluctant to let a $100,000 probe sink to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, hesitated by the borehole. Everyone was shouting.

  Aaron didn’t hear them. The shadow hadn’t stopped moving. Now it was so close it had started to take shape. He could see legs, the bulge of a head. It didn’t look right for a polar bear – too tall, too thin and too dark. Maybe a reindeer? He’d heard they could float out on the sea ice way off from land.

  No one was going to chew him out for shooting a reindeer. He fired another shot into the air, scattering more scientists, then put the Remington to his shoulder and aimed at the shape in the fog. Even in the liner gloves, his fingers had got so cold they felt swollen fat. He squeezed the trigger again.

  The mechanism clicked on a spent shell. He’d forgotten to chamber the next round. He pawed at the pump, ejected the shell and slammed in another round. Pulled the trigger.

  It was a lousy shot. His finger wouldn’t bend, so he had to jerk the trigger with his whole arm, pulling the shotgun wide. Did he miss? The bear was still coming at him. He fumbled with the pump again, but his hand was so cold he couldn’t work the action. Fuck.

  He looked up to see if he was going to die. The cloud shifted, like someone opening the drapes, and just like that he saw it clearly. Not a bear, or a deer. It was a man. Skiing over the ice in jerky, broken movements: lunging up, shuffling forward, then slumping down again, using the ski poles like crutches. He wore a red coat and black ski pants; a red fur-trimmed hood was zipped up over his face.

  I nearly shot Santa Claus.

  It must be one of the geeks gone off the reservation, lost his way in the fog. But the geeks didn’t ski. And they wore red pants, not black.

  The man stopped as if he’d skied into a brick wall, almost falling over in his bindings. He threw out his arms and flailed his ski poles frantically; maybe he tried to say something, but either his hood muffled it or his voice was too weak. Without the poles to hold him up, he lost his balance and toppled smack into the snow.

  Aaron laid down the gun and ran over. There was a name badge sewn on the jacket, Torell, and under it an insignia he didn’t recognise. A twelve-pointed star with a roaring polar bear in the middle. Next to it, blood leaked out from a nickel-sized hole punched through the fabric, crystallising almost as soon as it hit the snow.

  Oh shit.

  Footsteps floundered through the snow behind him. Lieutenant Commander Santiago, the ops officer, still in his ODU pants and a jacket he’d pulled on in a hurry. He stared at the figure on the ground.

  ‘Where in this godless white fucking hell did he come from?’

  The man stirred; feeble clouds of air puffed off his lips as he tried to speak. Aaron put his head close. The fur tickled his cheek.

  ‘What’d he say?’ Santiago demanded.

  Aaron looked up.

  ‘It sounded like Zodiac.’

  Two

  USCGC Terra Nova

  The Terra Nova had the biggest sickbay in the Coast Guard fleet, but no doctor. Just a physician’s assistant, the PA, Lieutenant (JG) Carolyn Parsons. For most of the crew’s problems – splinters, scalds, sprains and sore heads – that was fine. For more serious cases, she could patch in the district surgeon on the video link. If that didn’t work, it was the helicopter or – worst case – a body bag and the cold-storage reefer.

  But the video link was down, the helicopter had nowhere to go, and she was damned if she was going to lose her first major trauma. Even if it was more complicated than anything she’d been trained for. The manuals didn’t say how to treat someone for a gunshot wound and hypothermia at the same time. Lucky the slug had gone wide, taking a bite out of his arm but missing the bone.

  He lay in a steaming-hot bath she’d rigged in the corner of the sickbay; a thermometer clipped to the side read 104˚ Fahrenheit. A saline drip snaked down from the ceiling and fed into his arm, just below the blood-soaked gauze pad strapped to his bicep. His clothes lay in a plastic basket on the floor where she’d cut them off him, together with a few things she’d found in his pockets.

  He was a big man, even bigger than Commander Santiago. He couldn’t have eaten much on the ice – the only trace of food in his pockets was a Mars bar wrapper – but he was still in great shape. She’d needed two crewmen to help her hoist him into the tub. He didn’t fit full stretch, but lay on his side, his knees tucked up like a baby. A folded towel cushioned his head. His eyes were closed; the heat had thawed the ice in his hair and matted it flat, revealing a small scar behind his left ear. She guessed he must be about thirty.

  ‘What’s up, Doc?’ Santiago ducked through the sickbay door and leaned against the cream-painted bulkhead. ‘Is he gonna live?’

  ‘Most of him.’ She pointed to the patient’s right foot, where hard black boils blistered the skin. ‘Might need to take off a couple of toes. Too early to say just yet.’

  ‘He’ll walk funny for the rest of his life.’

  ‘He’s lucky to be alive.’ She checked the thermometer and ran more hot water. ‘Frostbite, hypothermia, exposure and a slug … Did he really ski all the way from Zodiac Station?’

  ‘Unless he got the jacket mail order.’ Santiago crossed the room and pulled down the jacket from the peg she’d hung it on. ‘Imagine, you come all that way and then a Coastie puts a slug in you.’

  ‘Semper Paratus.’

  ‘To fuck you up.’ He wiggled his finger through the hole
in the fabric – then stiffened.

  ‘How many times did you say he got shot?’

  ‘Once was enough.’

  ‘Take a look at this.’ He brought the coat over and stretched it out between his hands. Just below the Zodiac Station badge, his finger poked through another hole. A broad patch stained the fabric around it a darker shade of red.

  ‘I did a tour in Umm Qasr. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that looks like the entry point for a thirty-calibre bullet.’

  ‘Then where’s the wound? If that was a bullet, it would have gone right through his heart.’ Parsons pointed to the man’s chest. ‘No damage. Plus, there can’t be anyone out there inside of a hundred miles from here.’

  ‘Maybe the polar bears got pissed off.’

  A scream, like something from a horror movie, tore through the sickbay. The man in the bath was sitting up, legs tucked against his chest and eyes wide open. Water sheeted down his bare skin, as if the ice inside him had finally melted and was flooding out through his pores.

  Parsons rushed over and tried to ease him back down into the bath. ‘You need to keep down, sir. If your extremities heat too fast, there’s a risk of heart failure.’

  He resisted. Water splashed over the side and pooled on the floor. He was too strong; even half dead he couldn’t be moved against his will. Santiago came over, but she waved him back. You couldn’t force this.

  ‘Sir, if you don’t stay in the water, the warm blood in your extremities will flood back to your core and stop your heart. In your condition, it probably won’t start again.’

  He stopped struggling. ‘It hurts,’ he groaned.

  ‘Hurts like a motherfucker,’ she agreed. ‘That’s a good thing. It means you’re alive.’

  She pushed his shoulders down. He didn’t fight her this time; through clenched teeth, he let her add more hot water. His eyes followed the line of the IV drip up to the bag, then scanned the room. ‘Where am I?’

  ‘Aboard the Coast Guard cutter Terra Nova.’ It didn’t seem to register. She poured a cup of hot water from a flask and handed it to him. ‘You’re safe, Mr Torell.’